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How to rename the user profile folder in Windows 10 (C:\Users\Username)

Folks on Internet often ask how to rename the profile folder in C:\Users. If you are using thge Microsoft account the folder name is usually shortened in a random way and very often looks weird. For instance for the user Tunecomp.net we have the path C:\Users\Tunec\. So let’s see how to change the name of this folder in Windows 10 Pro and Home.

How to rename the user account profile folder in Windows 10

This method works with any edition of Windows 10: Home, Pro or Enterprise but can cause damage to your system.

1. Ensure that you have another admin account. If you do not have such you can temporarily activate the built-in user called Administrator:

net user administrator /active:yes

Note, that if you have non-English version of Windows 10, your Administrator account name will differ. For example, in French version the built-in administrative account has the username “Administrateur”, in Spanish – “Administrador”. Thus, you should specify your exact username otherwise you will get the error “The user name could not be found“! To find out the correct user name type net user in the command line window and hit Enter.

2. Sign out or reboot your PC:

3. Log in to another account:

4. Go to the Users folder (C:\Users by default) and rename the profile folder to whatever you like:

Find the key related to the account the profile of which you have just renamed, find the ProfileImagePath value and rename the path in it to the new one:

6. An extra step. Perform it if you encounter errors after you changed the path to your profile. Search the registry for ‘old account name’. If you find the values with the old path change it the the new one. Hit “F3” in the registry editor until you correct all entries containing the old path.

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22 comments

Followed the directions but it didn’t work early on. After a reboot and signing on as administrator I tried to change the folder name in the explorer (e.g. tunec to tunecomp.net) but got the error:
“Folder in Use
The action can’t be completed because the folder of file in it is open in another program.”
I thought is was because the c: drive was shared so I unshared, rebooted, and retried but got the same error. This installation of Win10 is only a few days old.

Hello,
Firstly you need to sign out from the user account you wish to change.Simply go to start menu click on the user icon then on sign out option,now sign in with administrator account and you are all done.
Hope this will help you!
Thanks

What methods did you try? Do you remember? Honestly, Microsoft is ridiculous for doing this to people. I need my username folder to be the same as it was on my last installation of Windows so that I can get certain programs that rely on My Documents to work without having to change hundreds of entries manually.

I tried to rename the folder but it said that the folder I was renaming did not exist. Then when I exited administrator and came back later, the desktop for the administrator account would disappear. The mouse was still visible and I would open task manager, but that’s it.

I managed to change the username folder successfully but had to do a couple of registry edits to fix a couple of apps. No big deal. However, I noticed that I have many “orphaned” registry entries pointing to “Users\old_username” still in the registry. They don’t seem to be causing problems. But should I try and do a global replace (i.e. Users\old_username to Users\new_username)?